Who: Mr Alvin Tan, 53, chief executive of the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre (SCCC). The former deputy chief executive for policy and community at the National Heritage Board took over the helm of SCCC in June 2024.
One of his goals at SCCC is to strengthen support for local Chinese arts and cultural groups, hence the ongoing inaugural Chinese Opera Festival 2025. The festival, which is on till July 26, showcases works by five Singapore opera troupes, each representing a different dialect.
BBC News, Bedfordshire
Bedford PromsOpera singer and performer Lesley Garrett said she was “honoured” to be invited back to an outdoor concert series to restart a Proms event.
Garrett, 70, will perform at Proms in the Park, alongside Russell Watson, as part of the Bedford Summer Sessions on Sunday 6 July.
The event was last held in the town in 2023 and has returned after requests from members of the public, organisers said.
Garrett said it could be the last Proms she performs in, but “I will give it my all, which is still considerable”.
Martin McKay“Singing isn’t something I do for a living, it’s what I am”, she said.
“I do it because that’s what I was born to do.”
“It’s an exciting time in my life. I no longer have to prove anything. I’m not looking to grow my career, but enjoy the legacy of being in the profession for 45 years, as I started in 1980.”
After the Proms, her next role will be Heidi Schiller in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies for the Northern Ireland Opera Company in September.
Then she will help plan a November concert for Bantam of the Opera, a choir she is involved with, before undergoing a hip replacement.
Welsh National OperaGarrett said music was in her soul, and she would “carry on until I can no longer perform”.
“The big criteria is whether I’m still good enough – I still have singing lessons every week with Joy Mammen, my original singing teacher,” she said.
“We will then decide together to hang up those chords. I would hate to start disappointing people. You never know if the next one is going to be the last.”
Garrett last came to the town to sing in 2018 and said she could not wait to return to Bedford to perform in the Proms with her “old friend” Russell Watson.
“If it’s my last Proms, I’m thrilled it’s going to be with him,” she continued.
“I’m honoured to be asked to restart the Bedford Proms, I will give it my all, which is still considerable.”
Bedford PromsMark Harrison, promoter at Cuffe & Taylor, said the absence of the Proms from the Summer Sessions in 2024 “left many feeling disappointed”.
“We have listened to the general public’s wishes, and we are delighted that we have been able to bring it back for 2025,” he said.
The last Proms was held in 2023, in a slightly different format as West End Proms.
On the face of it Princess Kate and I are very different people living very different lives. When I travel home from a gruelling session of chemotherapy there’s always a risk I’ll get stabbed on the tram. If she’s on a tram, it would be for a royal engagement. My cheesy pasta is less about fresh ingredients and more about a jar of pesto and a bag of pre-grated cheese. I’m sure her version is much more wholesome. But her comments on Wednesday, July 2, made me realise that as two people affected by cancer, we are both very similar.
Everyone’s cancer journey is different, but by speaking out about the mental impact of treatment, and what happens afterwards, Princess Kate said what I try to say, but in a much better way. Speaking to patients at a cancer wellbeing centre at Colchester Hospital, she discussed the emotional impact of fighting the disease.
Describing it as a “rollercoaster”, Princess Kate said: “There is a whole phase when you finish your treatment, everybody expects you to be better – go! But that’s not the case at all.
“You’re not necessarily under the clinical team any longer but you’re not able to function normally at home as you perhaps once used to.
“And actually someone to help talk you through that, show you and guide you through that sort of phase that comes after treatment I think is really valuable.”
I doubt I will ever get to an “after treatment” phase but my experience last week of being told I don’t have spinal cancer feels pretty close.
First, there was the worry of thinking I could be dead by Christmas, and then, after scan results came back, the wondering what to do now.
How do I readjust my life to get back to fighting my incurable bowel cancer while recognising the spinal cancer scare?
It is the kind of question that thousands of cancer patients grapple with every day. Just what is the best way to tackle the emotional impact of cancer after being left to process good or bad news?
As Princess Kate says, there isn’t an easy answer. For me, the solution is why I’m leading the Daily Express’s Cancer Care campaign.
Cancer is the worst thing that most people will experience in their lifetime, and the emotional impact of it can tear people apart, even more than the physical side effects. This is why we are calling for all patients to have mental health support both during and after their treatment.
Princess Kate recognises just how important this is, and I hope the NHS and the Department of Health listen to her and us and make sure it’s available for all patients across the country.
Channel 4; available now
Summed up in a sentence A belated airing of the hugely controversial documentary that the BBC refused to show: a horrifying investigation into claims that Israel’s Defence Force has systematically targeted Palestinian medics.
What our reviewer said “This is the sort of television that will never leave you. It will provoke an international reaction, and for extremely good cause. Forget what got it stopped at the BBC. It is here now and, regardless of how that happened, we owe it to the subjects to not look away.” Stuart Heritage
Read the full review
Further reading Gaza film’s producer accuses BBC of trying to gag him over decision to drop it
BBC iPlayer; available now
Summed up in a sentence The second series of a brilliant, startlingly feral comedy about a trio of troubled female relatives – whose first outing won a comedy Bafta.
What our reviewer said “Such Brave Girls won’t be to everyone’s tastes. But if you like your comedy scary, lairy and perfectly portioned, it is a total knockout.” Hannah J Davies
Read the full review
Further reading ‘Who else can we annoy with our show?’: Such Brave Girls, Britain’s most gleefully offensive comedy returns
Netflix; full series available
Summed up in a sentence Interviewees including Tony Blair feature in this absolutely comprehensive look at how the 2005 London transport bombings prompted the UK’s largest criminal investigation.
What our reviewer said “Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail.” Rebecca Nicholson
Read the full review
BBC iPlayer; all episodes available
Summed up in a sentence Adam Curtis applies his archive-footage packed documentary style to explaining how the atomisation of UK society has destroyed our democracy – with mesmerising results.
What our reviewer said “It is an increasing rarity to stand in the presence of anyone with an idea, a thesis, that they have thoroughly worked out to their own satisfaction and then presented stylishly, exuberantly and still intelligently. The hell and the handcart feel that bit more bearable now.” Lucy Mangan
Read the full review
Further reading Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war
In cinemas now
Summed up in a sentence Near-extinct franchise roars back to life as latest instalment offers Spielberg-style set pieces and excellent romantic chemistry between leads Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey.
What our reviewer said “This new Jurassic adventure isn’t doing anything so very different from the earlier successful models, perhaps, and I could have done without its outrageous brand synergy product placement for certain brands of chocolate bar. But it feels relaxed and sure-footed in its Spielberg pastiche, its big dino-jeopardy moments and its deployment of thrills and laughs.” Peter Bradshaw
Read the full review
Further reading ‘The script didn’t have Jurassic World on the front’: Gareth Edwards on Monsters, Godzilla, Star Wars and reinventing dinosaurs
In cinemas now
Summed up in a sentence Elaborate necrophiliac meditation on loss and longing from David Cronenberg, starring Vincent Cassel as an oncologist who has founded a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached.
What our reviewer said “The film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore.” Peter Bradshaw
Read the full review
Further reading ‘Something must have gone wrong with us’: David Cronenberg and Howard Shore on four decades of body horror
In cinemas now
Summed up in a sentence Superb documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now, with Coppola’s epic meltdown in the jungle.
What our reviewer said “Haemorrhaging money and going insanely over-schedule, Coppola shot his film in the Philippines during burning heat, humidity and monsoons and borrowed army helicopters and pilots from President Ferdinand Marcos, only to find that on many occasions – especially during the legendary Ride of the Valkyries attack scene – filming had to halt as the Filipino military would ask for their helicopters back so they could suppress a communist insurgency. In fact, Coppola found himself reproducing reality on a 1:1 scale.” Peter Bradshaw
Read the full review
Further reading Francis Ford Coppola: ‘Apocalypse Now is not an anti-war film’
Prime Video; available now
Summed up in a sentence John Cena and Idris Elba star in fun and well-modulated throwback comedy as the US president and UK prime minister, who team up to escape terrorists.
What our reviewer said “Fun, fiery and totally frivolous, Heads of State is a perfect summer movie with great potential for future sequels.” Andrew Lawrence
Read the full review
Sky Cinema and Now; available now
Summed up in a sentence Compelling story of Formula One star Damon Hill’s trials on and off the racetrack in its depiction of the psychological pressure cooker in which the driver competed.
What our reviewer said “It has quiet, but profound, lessons to impart in its emphasis on the driver’s need to live up to his roistering father Graham, and on the real meaning of victory in the most alpha of environments that is Formula One.” Phil Hoad
Read the full review
Further reading ‘I was angry at the world’: Damon Hill on pain of his father’s death and how it fuelled his rise
Review by Dorian Lynskey
Summed up in a sentence An investigation into the causes of America’s 1970s serial killer epidemic comes up with some surprising answers.
What our reviewer said “It is as hauntingly compulsive a nonfiction book as I have read in a long time. It gets into your blood.”
Read the full review
Review by Joanna Quinn
Summed up in a sentence A sequel to Hideous Kinky, 30 years on, explores the effects of an unconventional upbringing.
What our reviewer said “It’s billed as a novel but arguably occupies an interesting grey area between novel and memoir, resisting the expectations of both and creating something all of its own.”
Read the full review
Further reading ‘When I read my sister’s stories I think, that’s not what it was like!’: Esther Freud on the perils of writing about family
Review by Beejay Silcox
Summed up in a sentence An ambitious, globe-trotting epic of political and family secrets.
What our reviewer said “Flashlight is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger, confronting a chapter of North Korean history that American fiction has barely touched.”
Read the full review
Review by Sam Leith
Summed up in a sentence Deadpan short stories that range from the surreal to the philosophical to the absurd.
What our reviewer said “Not so much one book as a library of tiny books, from an author who conveys as well as any I can think of just how much fun you can have with a short story.”
Read the full review
Review by Houman Barekat
Summed up in a sentence Inside the glittering, gossipy world of publisher Condé Nast.
What our reviewer said “Grynbaum quotes one journalist who believes she missed out on an editorship because, during the interview lunch, she gauchely ate asparagus with cutlery rather than by hand”
Read the full review
In bookshops now
Summed up in a sentence The murdered Guardian journalist’s final investigation, completed by his friends and supporters.
What our reviewer said “A book both brilliant and broken, one that is ultimately as inspiring and devastating as the Amazon itself” Charlie Gilmour
Read the full review
Further reading A deadly mission: how Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira tried to warn the world about the Amazon’s destruction
Out now
Summed up in a sentence After a long legal battle, the pop star’s sixth album harks back to her 2010s hot-mess era, with a buffet of pop styles and only rare hints of her highly publicised trauma.
What our reviewer said “The songs are all really strong, filled with smart little twists and drops, and funny, self-referential lines.” Alexis Petridis
Read the full review
Further reading ‘I would walk in and just cry for two hours’: Kesha on cats, court cases, and the dangers of ‘toxic positivity’
Out now
Summed up in a sentence The UK collective have been reimagining south Asian music since 2020, and their new compilation splices junglism and afro-house on to gems in Sony India’s catalogue.
What our reviewer said “Reframing this nostalgic cinema music for the modern dancefloor, Alterations proves there is still plenty of space for future generations of diaspora artists to celebrate and find inspiration in their heritage.” Ammar Kalia
Read the full review
Out now
Summed up in a sentence Despair runs through the Londoner’s fifth album but, in what is essentially a love letter to the trans community, his home town and partner, beauty breaks through.
What our reviewer said “Hope and hard-won happiness, against all odds, underpins this rich, compelling and timely record.” Rachel Aroesti
Read the full review
Further reading Kae Tempest: ‘I was living with this boiling hot secret in my heart’
Out now
Summed up in a sentence Performed by Russian pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, these 24 works, modelled on Bach, date from 1950 and 1951 and were originally written for pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva.
What our reviewer said “Avdeeva takes a lighter approach, less forthright, and perhaps not digging as deeply into the barely disguised tragedy of the E minor Prelude as Nikolayeva does, but equally dazzling in the exuberant display of the A minor.” Andrew Clements
Read the full review
Playing outdoor shows this week
Summed up in a sentence Playing outdoor shows including the big send-off for Black Sabbath on Saturday, the thrash legends have reformed and are playing their first UK gigs in six years.
What our reviewer said “Slayer are still a shocking proposition, their churning riffs punctuated by gross-out gore and grim images from endless war. Subtle? No. Effective? Absolutely.” Huw Baines
Read the full review
BBC News, Buckinghamshire
Getty ImagesEuston Station, 1937: The royal train sits quietly at the platform with a policeman posted outside to guard young Princess Elizabeth; suddenly he hears a soft knock on the carriage window behind him.
The future Queen beckons him inside. “Here’s a shilling,” she says. “Can you go and get me a comic please?”
This is one of many anecdotes told by those who worked on the train that are now preserved by journalist and author Phil Marsh.
He says with a laugh: “Can you imagine being the policeman who’s supposed to be guarding the heir to the throne and then being told to go and buy a comic?”
Reportedly, the officer did just that.
royaltrain.co.ukIn 2027, 90 years after this moment took place, the royal train will be pulled from service.
Buckingham Palace has taken the decision to decommission the historic rolling stock as part of a “drive to ensure we deliver value for money”.
It will be taken around the UK before it is removed from service.
Mr Marsh first became associated with the train in 1997 when he was tasked with putting together a business case to sell it, but he says it “fortunately didn’t stack up”.
He made friends with Leo Coleman, project manager at Wolverton Works, Buckinghamshire, where the train is kept, who was responsible for modernising the train for the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977.
After Mr Coleman died he was left his archive and tasked with chronicling its story, and he has shared some of those memories for this article.
royaltrain.co.ukThe comic book story was documented by Chris Hillyard, the last foreman of the train, who died in November with cancer.
On another occasion Mr Hillyard was on the train, alongside the Queen, when he noticed a smell of smoke.
He stopped the train and asked the signalman to block the adjacent railway while he investigated the fault.
While he was doing this, the Queen appeared at the window, apparently unaware the other line had been closed.
She said: “Oh, Mr Hillyard, I’ll be your lookout. It’ll be quite safe.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” he responded politely.
royaltrain.co.ukQueen Adelaide was the first member of the Royal Family to have a carriage built for the royal train in 1842.
It continued to be used by members of the Royal Family, including Queen Victoria, who would often stop at Wolverton for a refreshment break as the train did not have toilets.
In 1869 Wolverton Works built the very first bespoke royal carriages for Queen Victoria, costing £1,800. The monarch donated £800.
A special shed was constructed for the train in 1869 at Wolverton but has since been converted to flats, though the train has remained at the site for its entire history.
King Edward VII innovated in 1901 when he introduced electricity, powered by the steam engine, but a generator was eventually installed in 1941 alongside radio and telephones.
In 1977, when Mr Coleman was tasked with upgrading the royal train for the jubilee, the focus shifted from luxury to function.
Members of the Royal Family were expected to live and work on the train for long periods, requiring functional design changes such as an office.
royaltrain.co.ukThe first journey after the 1977 upgrade was from Euston to Glasgow.
After completing their engagement Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh asked to speak to Mr Coleman.
“Everything all right, ma’am?” he asked.
“No,” she responded, “what’s happened to the old ironing board?”
As part of the improvements a new ironing board had been installed but the Queen’s lady-in-waiting wanted the old one back.
Mr Coleman called Wolverton Works and a member of staff had to find it and carry it to Glasgow on the next available train.
ReutersToday, the seven carriages that make up the royal train are owned by Network Rail while the locomotives named King’s Messenger and Royal Sovereign are owned by DB Cargo UK.
Gemini Rail Services run Wolverton Works, where the train is maintained.
Engineers from DB Cargo and personnel from Gemini are on board during all journeys in case something goes wrong.
The seven carriages include a saloon for King Charles, which includes his own bedroom and lounge.
There is also his day coach, a restaurant cart and a dining cart, and the remaining carts are for use of support staff.
DB Cargo told the BBC when the royal contract expires on 31 March 2027 it will retain its locomotives and may put them on other traffic.
Network Rail has been asked what it plans to do with its carriages, but has not yet responded.
Mr Marsh, who documents the train’s history on the website royaltrain.co.uk, hopes they will be kept in a museum.
“Every carriage on the train has been designated as part of the national collection,” he explained.
“Designation means that it can’t be scrapped. It will need to go to a museum whether it’s at York or any other museum is up for debate.”
Ólafur Arnalds had a cold knot of dread in his stomach when he flew to Cork to say farewell to his friend and musical collaborator Eoin French – aka Talos – shortly before his death, last August.
“He was in his last few days – a week – and we knew it was nearing the end. I was so nervous. I was kind of crying the whole way on the plane. I was shaking, walking into the room to come talk to him,” Arnalds, the composer, producer and DJ, says from his studio in Reykjavík.
He was struck by French’s positivity at their final meeting at Marymount Hospice – how at peace he was with the world. “I walked out of that room laughing. That’s the kind of a guy he was. He was the one on death’s door. But he cared about making me feel good on our last meeting. He cared that I would walk out of there with a good memory of our relationship.
“He asked me, ‘How are you doing?’ I was, like, ‘F**k that. How are you doing? Are you okay, man?’ He took this with the grace of a god. Sorry to use such a big word, but that’s the kind of a person he was.”
With such a wide range of musical interests and inspirations, he found a kindred spirit in French, who, across his three albums as Talos, incorporated influences as far-flung as Sigur Rós (from Arnald’s native Iceland), Bon Iver, Frank Ocean and Cocteau Twins.
[ Talos: To listen to Eoin French’s music was to be transported to a hauntingly beautiful parallel dimensionOpens in new window ]
As French’s health declined, he and Arnalds met to finish a series of compositions they had worked on the across the previous several years. Those songs are being released this month under the title A Dawning. It is a beautiful tribute to French, a songwriter from just outside Cork city, whose hazy, dreamlike music was punctuated with bursts of wonder, like rainbows followed by a sudden downpour of emotion.
Powerful feelings likewise ripple through A Dawning, whether via the ambient throb of Signs, which features a tender vocal from French, or the haunting We Didn’t Know We Were Ready, a sobbing acoustic number in which the Irish singer looks forward to the “peace that breaks at dawn”.
As is inevitable given the circumstances in which it was made, the album arrives with an aura of sadness. Yet for Arnalds it is not a project about death so much as an outpouring of joy and an acknowledgment of the preciousness of life – a point the musician, with Nordic directness, is eager to get across.
“Enough for the death questions, because, actually, we made this record while he was very much alive,” Arnalds says. “You’re now looking at it with the perspective of [French’s death]. But, the record, it’s not about that: the record is a celebration of life. It’s a trap, a little bit, for us, you know – me and you talking in an interview, or for a listener, for fans, for journalists – to kind of put this record always within that box, to always frame it [with death].
“I’ll tell you, when we wrote those songs we were having the best time of our lives. We were having a beautiful time together. We were communicating as friends through some of the best music both of us felt like we had ever done – and that’s what this record celebrates.”
Arnalds and French were introduced by the festival programmer and artistic curator Mary Hickson, who brought them together for Sounds from a Safe Harbour, in Cork.
Arnalds has a lump in his throat as he remembers their first meeting against the unglamorous backdrop of a hotel conference room. Despite the inauspicious setting, they had a creative spark from the outset. The collaboration continued after French received a cancer diagnosis in November 2023. He died on August 11th, 2024, at the age of 36, survived by his wife and daughter.
“It was the hottest day of the year in Cork, and we were doing this kind of artistic residency connected to the Sounds from a Safe Harbour festival,” Arnalds says of their first get-together. “We wrote the first songs in a conference room on the second floor of the hotel. It was pretty bare bones, very institution-like. But with an upright piano. That was wonderful. We had our laptops and a couple of microphones. We would have to turn off the AC while recording anything. [It was] sticky and sweaty and [we were] drinking copious amounts of coffee.”
The death of a friend is never easy, but Arnalds was struck by Irish people’s openness about the subject.
“Iceland is Protestant – in its modern roots, anyway.” Ireland and Iceland “both had the same kind of old pagan traditions. Today we’re Protestant, and death is not something you face. You don’t look at that in the eyes. And it was eye-opening for me to be in Ireland for a wake. There’s just dancing and singing. I was absolutely fascinated by it, and very impressed.
“And I wish we had even half of that here. I feel like here, someone dies … they get kind of removed very quickly. We wait maybe two weeks or so, until a convenient day for the funeral. We might have a little open casket for the closest people the night before. Then the funeral will happen in the daytime, and afterwards people will eat some cake and go home.”
Much of the album was put together at French’s house near Clonakilty, in west Cork. The landscape reminded Arnalds of home, Ireland and Iceland being, he says, two hunks of rock plonked into the North Atlantic. He also felt parallels between the Irish language and Icelandic, both under threat in a globalised world – albeit for different reasons.
“It’s no wonder that we connect quickly to Irish people. We didn’t have our language taken away from us in the same way Ireland did. But we are currently fighting not to lose it in a different way – through globalisation and social media and just technology that always is in English. Kids are starting to speak English instead of Icelandic sometimes now. So we are also fighting a fight for our language.
“It was fun to discuss that with Eoin and talk about those things. And I’ve been very impressed meeting so many Irish people in the last couple of years and seeing the revival of the Irish language. I find it absolutely beautiful. Look at Kneecap,” he says, referring to the Belfast-Derry group who rap largely in Irish.
Arnalds is polite and thoughtful but not a chatterbox. French operated on a similar wavelength. Both were comfortable in silence, which perhaps explains why they worked so well together.
“It is something we felt like the music is partly about. How much can be said in the silence. How brotherhood goes deeper than [chatter]. We would talk all the time, of course. But it never felt like we had to. And there would be whole evenings, whole days sometimes, where we would say, like, four words. We would just focus on the music we were making, or, on some occasions, just the books we were reading separately.
“There’s some kind of a magic that often happens with music – when you are doing music together, you are speaking to each other, you are communicating to each other. It just doesn’t have to be big discussions.”
Since French’s death Arnalds has been tweaking the album. He is glad it is coming out into the world and is looking forward to returning to Sounds from a Safe Harbour, where he will participate in a tribute to French at Cork Opera House on September 11th – having already delivered a musical elegy to the Corkman on The Tommy Tiernan Show last January, when he performed We Didn’t Know We Were Ready, alongside its co-composers Niamh Reagan and Ye Vagabonds. They were joined by other acquaintances of French, including the Watford sisters The Staves, Kate Ellis of Crash Ensemble, the Cork singer Laoise Leahy and the superstar Dermot Kennedy.
Honouring his friend’s memory has been immensely emotional. That said, Arnalds has understandably had some anxiety in the run-up to the release. Finishing the LP in his studio, he would sense French at his side.
“I would miss him a lot. I would feel nervous. Am I doing the right thing? I can’t ask him does he like this. I would feel self-conscious around our friends or family, me being given the role of representing him in this way.
“On the other hand, there is no better place to channel your grief. I feel extremely fortunate to have this. I’m very glad I have this as a way to channel my emotions. A lot of the time I could feel him next to me working on this. We were still having a good time together, in some way.”
Olafúr Arnalds & Talos: A Dawning is released by Deutsche Grammophon on Friday, July 11th. Remembering Talos is at Cork Opera House on September 11th, as part of Sounds from a Safe Harbour
Riccardo Scamarcio pops up on my Zoom screen at a roadside cafe with a curtain of blue behind him. Darkly handsome in a crisp white shirt, he puffs on a cigarette – very old school – while answering in the most cleanly perfect English. He is crossing the mountains to Tuscany. The spirit of classic Italian cinema could hardly be better honoured if he were rendered in black and white.
I mention this as his appearance reminds me of how Johnny Depp came to cast him as Amedeo Modigliani in the American actor’s second feature as director. Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness follows the painter and sculptor as he cavorts through an earthily rendered version of early 20th-century Paris. There is a great deal of arguing in bars and necking in graveyards.
Depp had arranged to talk to Scamarcio early in the evening, but he was forced to knock the meeting back by three hours. At that point the Italian was driving with his daughter and the nanny. He called into a petrol station. Happily, the staff recognised the star and allowed him to use a side building for the Zoom.
“We were talking, and after a while Johnny says, ‘Hey, man. Can I say something? Where are you?’ There was stuff around for cars, oil, strange tools around me. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, but I’m in the gas station. I was driving, and this is the only place I could stage the Zoom call.’ He says, ‘In a gas station!’ I didn’t know this at the time, but the producer was there off-screen. And Johnny said, ‘He is in a gas station. This is my man!’”
This is how the business now works. You do press interviews in hillside cafes and take auditions in petrol stations.
“Yeah, it was rock’n’roll,” he says. “Johnny is a very special person. He is very sweet and very gentle and very kind to every single one. He is a person who likes paradox.”
Scamarcio, now in his mid-40s, has been exhaustingly busy in Italian cinema and TV for more than 20 years. Back in 2005 he was rough-hewn in the epic gangster flick Romanzo Criminale. He has worked with Abel Ferrara and Costa-Gavras. You can see him in Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, about Silvio Berlusconi, and Nanni Moretti’s Three Floors. He doesn’t need to stretch into English-language productions, but he, nonetheless, has been happy to show off his polyglottal talents in films such as John Wick: Chapter 2 and Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice.
“It’s very important to work in other countries,” Scamarcio says. “In English you have more opportunities. The market is bigger. I speak very fluent French too. So I’ve been shooting films in France. I’m very known in my country. When you work outside your country it’s fantastic, because people don’t know you, so nobody cares. They have no expectation from you, right? There is another level, which is the language. Acting in another language is like having a mask.”
How familiar was Scamarcio with Modigliani before coming to the film? The elongated faces and mournful eyes that characterise his work are – though, as the film explains, underappreciated in his life – now an immovable part of the culture. That must be even more so in the artist’s native Italy.
“Yes, of course. My mother is a painter,” Scamarcio says. “I was obsessed with this big book that had pictures of his paintings and sculptures. My mother was always saying, ‘Why is this boy so obsessed with this book?’ Maybe it was a sign. I knew, of course, he had a very, very tough life.”
It hardly needs to be said that Depp is currently a controversial character. The Kentucky actor – somehow now 62 – has been a ubiquitous presence since the late 1980s. He was Jack Sparrow. He was Sweeney Todd. He was in a rock “supergroup” called Hollywood Vampires. (Three Days on the Wing of Madness is dedicated to late guitarist Jeff Beck.)
Over the past decade, however, he has drawn more attention for an acrimonious split with Amber Heard that led, in 2022, to Depp suing his then former wife, who had accused him of physical abuse, in the United States, for defamation. Heard was found liable. Two years earlier he had lost in the British courts after suing News Group over allegations of abuse against Heard published in the Sun newspaper. The dispute has, to say the least, caused some division on social media.
[ Who Trolled Amber? review: Relentless dig beneath Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard libel case makes a staggering revelationOpens in new window ]
When the mess went away (for then, anyway) Depp returned to a project he had first discussed with Al Pacino decades earlier: a study of Modigliani adapted from a play by Dennis McIntyre. Indeed, Pacino, who has an amusing role in Three Days on the Wing of Madness as a flamboyant art dealer, had been toying with the idea way back in the 1970s. Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and Francis Ford Coppola were all involved in conversations about it.
“Pacino was supposed to direct this project, and then he didn’t,” Scamarcio says. “It was his passion project since when he was young. Then he met Johnny in Donnie Brasco and they become friends. Pacino says, ‘I have this project. Maybe you could be perfect to play Modigliani.’ So Pacino was supposed to direct the film and Johnny to play Modigliani. It didn’t happen.”
Scamarcio is politely euphemistic about his director’s recent complications.
“Johnny had his problems that we all know,” he says. “When he won the case and he was back, Al says, ‘I think the moment is now correct for you to direct the film. I’m too old. I don’t want to do it. You should do it.’ And, as Johnny says all the time, if Pacino comes to you and says do something it’s better you do it.”
The resulting film is an amusing, anarchic romp through a highly romanticised version of Paris in 1916. As you might expect from Depp, there are a few rock’n’roll touches. At one stage The Black Angel’s Death Song, by The Velvet Underground, and Tom Waits’s Tom Traubert’s Blues vie for our attention. None of this gets in the way of a hugely charismatic turn from Scamarcio. He does good work as a misunderstood master who can barely scrabble together a few sous for artworks that would later sell for millions.
It is more than 28 years since The Brave, Depp’s indifferently received directorial debut. Did Scamarcio feel he had what it takes behind the camera?
“Basically it is about trust,” he says. “I felt that my director, Johnny Depp, trusted me very much. That is what it is all about. This is what an actor needs from his director. He needs to be loved and trusted. We did this journey together – experimenting things, changing, just trying to get some special life there.
“He was talking about Marlon Brando, when they were friends. We were talking about all the processes of being a cinema actor. For me, it confirmed all the things I believed when I think about my job. My job is to create an atmosphere.”
For all the flash and bang of Three Days on the Wing of Madness, it is at its best in the conversational duel between Pacino and Scamarcio. The older actor is a marvel. After a few decades of chewing the scenery, he seems to have recovered an inner calm.
“He’s still there, fighting as an actor and an artist,” Scamarcio says. “But with the simplicity and the fairness and the honesty of a 20-year-old actor.”
I wonder if Scamarcio could sense Pacino’s Italian roots. The American is, after all, only one generation distant from Sicilian origins.
“Oh, yeah. Because, well, you can take away an Italian man from Italy, but you can never take Italy away from an Italian. You know what I’m saying?”
Scamarcio does not seem to sleep. Early previews of the current film will feature a conversation, filmed at Tate Modern in London, between Scamarcio, Depp, the art critic Waldemar Januszczak and British artist Polly Morgan. He has another three Italian productions on the go. Will we hear him in English again soon?
“There is the international language – which is acting,” he says with a charming smile. “Being alive on scene – and being obscene. Being obscene, which means ‘out of scene’. It comes from the Greek.”
I’ll take his word for it. Educated man.
Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness is in cinemas from Friday, July 11th, with previews on Thursday, July 10th
In the age of self-help, self-improvement and self-obsession, there have never been more places to look to for guidance. Where the anxious and the uncertain might have once consulted a search engine for answers, now we can engage in a seemingly meaningful discussion about our problems with ChatGPT. Or, if you’re in China, DeepSeek.
To some, though, it feels as if our ancestors knew more about life than we do. Or at least, they knew how to look for them. And so it is that scores of young Chinese are turning to ancient forms of divination to find out what the future holds. In the past couple of years, fortune-telling bars have been popping up in China’s cities, offering drinks and snacks alongside xuanxue, or spiritualism. The trend makes sense: China’s economy is struggling, and although consumers are saving their pennies, going out for a drink is cheaper than other forms of retail therapy or an actual therapist. With a deep-rooted culture of mysticism that blends Daoist, Buddhist and folk practices, which have defied decades of the government trying to stamp out superstitious beliefs, for many Chinese people, turning to the unseen makes perfect sense.
This week, I decided to join them.
My xuanxue haunt of choice is Qie Le, a newly opened bar in Beijing’s wealthy Chaoyang district. On a Thursday evening, the bar, adorned with yellow Taoist talismans and draped translucent curtains, is quiet. All the better for hogging the fortune-teller’s attention with questions from my deep wells of narcissism. But Wan Mo, either because of her spiritual intuition or because I am not the first self-involved millennial to seek her services, sees me coming a mile off. It’s strictly one question per drink bought.
Wan Mo, a stylish 36-year-old dressed in a loose white Tang-style jacket fastened with traditional Chinese knots, specialises in qiuqian, or Chinese lottery sticks. The practice involves shaking a cylindrical wooden container full of wooden sticks, while focusing on a question in your mind. Eventually, one of the sticks, engraved with text and numerals, falls out, and a fortune-teller can interpret the answer. Qiuqian dates back to the Jin dynasty (AD266 to AD420) and has survived centuries of war, upheaval, a Cultural Revolution and the rise of artificial intelligence to remain a stalwart of Taoist temples, and now, Beijing cocktail bars.
So I’m hoping that qiuqian will be well placed to answer my first question: Will AI take my job?
“Use both hands,” Wan Mo says firmly. She is a no-nonsense savant. “Focus on your question.” She tells me that as a foreigner, my connection with the sticks might not be as profound as a Chinese person’s. So I need to “think carefully”.
After a few seconds of focused yet vigorous shaking, not one but two sticks drop on to the table between us.
Wan Mo studies the first one. “This stick means that later on, AI will have an impact on your job … even though you’re very talented, you can’t compete with its scale. For example, if you write one article, it can write 10. It will definitely affect you.”
This is not the spiritual salve I was hoping for. Wan Mo tells me that the second stick even provides a timeline for my professional redundancy. “It says that within one to three years, there won’t be a major impact. But after three years, AI will become a major force.”
Wan Mo’s predictions don’t leave me full of hope for my next question. But in the spirit of xuanxue, I decide to try my luck again, and order another round. We take a brief break for Wan Mo to have a cigarette break and catch up with a friend who has wandered into the bar. His chipper demeanour makes me think that he is yet to discover that AI will take his job – or he’s just made his peace with it.
Eventually I muster up enough liquid courage to ask my second question. Wan Mo’s stern demeanour sends a slight chill through my hands as I grasp the qiuqian box for the second time. Shake, shake, shake. Think, think, think. A single wooden stick falls out of the container.
“Will I get a pay rise?” I ask, tentatively. The answer comes unnervingly quickly.
“There’s not much possibility at the moment. Although [the stick] is about transition … it shows there is no major change … There is some hope, but it’s not immediate. You need to make some personal adjustments.”
I ask what kind of personal adjustments I could make, hoping that she won’t make me order another drink to find out.
“If you want a pay rise, xuanxue can only offer support,” she demurs. “For example, the bracelet I’m wearing is for attracting wealth. It’s made from natural materials … we’d recommend wearing something like this. It can help bring in some financial luck and may have a positive effect. But the most important thing is still communicating with the superiors.”
I am not sure if she means my spiritual or editorial superiors. But with that my time is up. Wan Mo’s friend says that everyone comes to Qie Le with the same kinds of questions: how to get rich, stay healthy, find love. I feel as if all I’ve discovered is how dim my chances are on the first question, and it’s getting too late to ask the second and third. I slink off home to get some sleep before my early start the next day. I bet AI doesn’t have to worry about feeling tired.
Additional research by Lillian Yang
When banker Louis-Auguste Cézanne bought the Jas de Bouffan mansion and park outside Aix-en-Provence in 1859, he assumed his only son would follow him into the family business and enjoy the place as a county retreat. He never dreamt that within a year the grand salon would be a studio, covered with violent, clumsy, bizarre images, and in the central alcove his own impasto portrait: fierce, unyielding face in profile, engrossed in his newspaper, austerely indifferent to his son’s paintings. A decade after the patriarch’s death, Paul Cézanne still introduced guests to “le papa” glowering on that wall.
Cézanne au Jas de Bouffan at Aix’s Musée Granet is riveting and revelatory from the moment of its opening coup: reuniting a dozen murals which Cézanne in his twenties painted directly on to the salon walls. Not seen together since 1907, when they began to be removed panel by panel, sold and dispersed worldwide, they range from “Bather and Rocks”, a tough, ungainly nude holding up a boulder against a torrent, acquired by Walter Chrysler, to classical figure allegories “The Four Seasons”. They are a prism into a young mind turbulent but already forging his path: taking from tradition to make painting new.
Unfolding how he did so, the show is, of course, ravishing. Rilke wrote of landscapes “made with the blue of the air, the blue of the sea and red roofs conversing together against a green ground”; to see these paintings in Aix is to understand Cézanne’s visceral connection to reality, even as he transformed nature, places he walked, swam, climbed, into near-abstract forms: modern art’s foundational story.
Many radiant pieces demonstrate that formal process: “House at Bellevue”, a geometric arrangement of honey-hued stone walls, steps, terraces, rows of pines; massive, angular orange cliffs below a strip of purple sky and blurred treetops in “The Bibémus Quarry”; proto-cubist houses rising above the water in “The Sea at L’Estaque”, once owned by Picasso.
A majestic, surging “Mont St Victoire”, sun sculpting the close-up mountain face into patches of light and shadow, found in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Nazi-era collection, makes its debut in a Cézanne show. Illuminating juxtapositions include paired “Grove at Jas de Bouffan” paintings, dense in 1871, luminous, freer, in 1875-76, demonstrating impressionism’s influence, and two splendid architectonic harmonies of variegated greens and ochres on an open plain: the Courtauld’s “Tall Trees at Jas de Bouffan” (1883), airy and rustling, and the Guggenheim’s “Neighbourhood of Jas de Bouffan” (1885-87) sombre, receding into emptiness, imbued with resignation.
The Granet’s argument, that just as Provence’s landscape shaped Cézanne, so the Roman city Aix and the 18th-century Jas were pivotal to his sensibility, poised between classicism and modernity, is amplified in a wider summer festival Cézanne 2025. It offers trails to the Jas, restored following a long closure, the studio Les Lauves and, for the brave, descent to the Bibémus rocks. So biography becomes immersive experience, with rewarding discoveries. In 2023, conservators at the Jas unveiled a fragmented unknown Cézanne, “Harbour Entrance” (1860), aping Claude’s port scenes. Also uncovered was a graceful plaster relief of Leda and the Swan, part of the house’s original decor; Cézanne passed it daily — inspiration, we see now, for his quirky painting of the same subject.
In his privileged salon, Cézanne both embraced and fought the Jas’s classical sumptuousness. Across the Granet’s downstairs galleries, fantasies such as “Game of Hide and Seek” (1862-64), imitating a Nicolas Lancret fête galante, alternate with rough, near-expressionist portraits in his early couillard (ballsy) manner, paint slathered on with a knife.
His schoolmate Émile Zola, poor, fatherless and physically weedy, looks particularly despondent, but all the friends — poet Antony Valabrègue, geologist Antoine-Fortune Marion — from Cézanne’s precious youthful coterie appear dark, introspective, downcast. “Paul is a horrible painter,” Valabrègue groaned. “Every time he paints one of his friends it seems as if he were avenging himself for some hidden injury”.
Looming over this evocative gathering is a second paternal portrait, fearful, affectionate: “The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Evenement” — a leftwing newspaper, employing young Zola. Louis-Auguste would not have touched it. Nor did he care for the picture depicted at his shoulder, and on display alongside: “Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup”, built from thick paint scrapings, crustily refusing convention, proclaiming independence.
Not until after his father’s death in 1886 did Cézanne dare his sole full-frontal view of the Jas. “House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan” (1885-87), from Prague, is the centrepiece of the upstairs landscape galleries, its monumental facade slightly swaying, the blue shutters echoing the clarity of the sky, offset by a brilliant red roof. Earlier depictions, as beautiful, are comparably hesitant: “The House at the Jas de Bouffan”, obscured by trees; “The Pool at Jas de Bouffan” playing with impressionist reflections on water.
From 1887, until he was forced to sell it in 1899, the Jas became Cézanne’s laboratory for three final grand series, all musing on painterly illusion: bathers, still lives, portraits of the estate’s workers.
Friezes of compressed female figures in broken outlines merge with landscape, echoing its slopes, mounds, trees, in “Bathers”: stylised imaginings of Mediterranean unity recalling Poussin, anticipating Matisse. The gauche young friends return, transmuted into awkwardly wading, undressing, reclining youths in “Bathers at Rest”.
“Still Life with Cherries and Apricots” and “Still Life with Apples and Melon”, ripe, rich, oozing, represent the French art of pleasure at its apogee, even as shifting viewpoints, tilting objects, bare areas of canvas — “Kitchen Table”, MoMA’s “Still Life with Apples” — assert painting as artifice.
Finally come “the people of Jas de Bouffan”, grave, humane, fateful. “The Card Players”’ columnar forms, emphatically separate, exist in contemplative, flickering equilibrium. Buttoned into a geometrically pleated blue dress “Woman with a Coffee Pot”, bearing work-hardened hands, is as rigid as her cafetière. Reserved in expression, lively in the restless strokes and dabs of colour, “Man with Crossed Arms” also has crossed eyes, one seen from above, one from below.
In “Peasant in a Blue Smock”, 1896-97, Cézanne at the Jas comes full circle: the worker, stoic, dignified, pensive, poses before a folding screen painted by Cézanne in 1859 with an 18th-century pastoral couple. In this painting of a painting, the peasant, weighty and substantial, is placed to obscure the screen man and imply that the sketchy screen woman, faceless, translucent, is his reverie of youth. Both express Cézanne’s hopes of art as eternal.
“Today everything is changing, but not for me,” he wrote shortly before he died. “I live in the town of my boyhood, and I rediscover the past in the faces of the people of my own age . . . who obey the rules of time”.
To October 12, museegranet-aixenprovence.fr, cezanne2025.com
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
